The Burial Mounds of Central Tibet, map

This map publication is the result of an interdisciplinary cooperation project between the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Institute for Social Anthropology (ISA) , and the University of Vienna, Department of Geography and Regional Research (IfGR), Section Cartography and Geoinformation. The theoretical framework of this project is based on an initiative to promote historical research with modern methods of spatial representation and geo-communication. The main objective of this collaboration was to study, with a comparative method and from different disciplinary perspectives, the manifold facets of depiction and representation methods in a historical context. The result is a large format map that encompasses an innovative approach within the field of Tibetan Studies and Cartography. The publication illustrates the position of the more than 600 burial mound fields in the central Tibetan region that have been registered so far by the Tibetan tumulus project, an Austrian Science Fund (FWF) financed long-term research conducted at the Austrian Academy of Sciences Institute for Social Anthropology. The entries of districts and key political sites related to the time of the Tibetan Empire (7th-9th cent. CE) form the relevant historical reference for this distribution map. This reveals a tumulus landscape of enormous concentration in the relatively small geographic area of Central Tibet ( Ü Tsang region), largely the ancient Bod, which in geographical, economic and political terms formed the heartland of the Tibetan Empire. The supplementary booklet gives insight in the methodology used as well as in the general topic of the burial mound sites of imperial Central Tibet including a short overview of the cartographic map structure, methods and creation. It concludes with a listing of the burial mound fields, which in coordination with the symbolic entries of the map provides information concerning the geographical position, the identification and principal classification of the individual sites.